Nationality and Borders Bill (Second sitting)

Jonathan Gullis Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 21st September 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Jonathan Gullis (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Con)]

Q Thank you, Ms McDonagh.

I am a bit perplexed. On the one hand, I am hearing that the system is broken; on the other, I am hearing that ultimately this is not going to be good enough. Lucy, on the pushbacks—I think the pushbacks are something that our commanders on those vessels need support and top cover from—you have said that that is not a deterrent, even though you have said that people will be scared of it. We have talked about the fact that people will not be getting access to housing in the legislation, at clause 11—we will use centres such as Napier barracks—which I think is brilliant and is also about the use of public resources; that will not deter. In Stoke-on-Trent they are livid at seeing illegal economic migrants—the ones coming over the Channel at the moment—paying thousands of pounds into the hands—

[The Chair]

Mr Gullis, I do not want to stop you, but it would be great if there could be a question, so that your colleagues can also ask questions.

[Jonathan Gullis]

There will be. Illegal economic migrants put thousands of pounds into the hands of people smugglers. Does that not show that these people are not genuine refugees or asylum seekers, like those we have seen from Afghanistan and Syria, who we have brought through safe and legal routes?

Lucy Moreton: It is a system that requires a great deal of money. You are not likely to have that money immediately available to you if you have fled in circumstances of danger. You may be able to gain it from relatives outside the country. Worse, though: you may put yourself into the hands of people traffickers, who will lend you the money for your crossing in exchange for your services in one way or another in the UK, be that in the grey economy or in modern slavery.

If you knew, before you spent all that money, that it was only going to get you a few weeks here until your claim is processed and dealt with, you would be far less likely to spend that money. If you knew that you spend that money and you are going to spend six to 10 years here to get through the system, that money is probably worth it.

[Jonathan Gullis]

Q Which is why the idea in clause 11 or clause 10 that in our United Kingdom we are going to potentially process people offshore, as with Denmark, is a positive and will help deter. If people know they are going to spend all that money and not even end up in the United Kingdom, that is a positive with the legislation.

Lucy Moreton: From what I understand, the experience of Australia has been that it has not been as much of a deterrent as they would have hoped, but certainly, on paper, anything that shortens the system is going to be a positive. The reasons why people travel are so multi-factoral; it is not going to be a 100% answer, but nothing is. If there was an easy answer, we would have done it a decade ago when this started to be a problem. It may help, but it will not be a universal panacea.

[Jonathan Gullis]

Q Zoe?

Zoe Gardner: I would like to pick up on the distinction you were making between Afghan refugees and the people you referred to as illegal economic migrants crossing the channel. It might interest you to learn that Afghans make up one of the most significant groups of people making those irregular journeys across the channel.

JCWI has some difficult in ascertaining at what point these people switch from being considered refugees—for example, if they worked with our military, or if they are gay and are facing persecution by the Taliban. Given that the resettlement efforts, as laudable as they are, will necessarily not reach all those people and certainly will not reach even all the people who worked with our troops in that country, if those people are facing being hunted down and murdered by the Taliban and are therefore forced to make a chaotic and immediate escape by whatever means necessary, be that with a smuggler, that does not remove their need for protection. It does not make them any less refugees.

It is really useful that you make that point, because it does point to a wider distinction that the Bill seeks to make, which is to draw a completely false distinction between two groups who are made up of essentially the same people. As I have mentioned, over two thirds of the people who are in Calais at the moment and who are making that crossing are from countries with very high recognition rates as refugees in this country. As I have said, they are from Iran, Sudan, Syria, Afghanistan. They are refugees and they need our protection.

I draw the Committee’s attention to the commitment made by the Home Secretary to implement the recommendations of the “Windrush Lessons Learned Review”. One of Wendy Williams’s recommendations in her review was to avoid viewing policy making on a binary of “Do this or do nothing”. That is the binary that, with respect, you are putting forward here. Nobody is suggesting that the status quo is acceptable. Unfortunately, the do-this option, according to all the available evidence, is likely to make the situation significantly worse rather than achieving its ends.

As Lucy mentioned, the evidence from Australia suggests that offshore processing centres for refugees had no discernible impact on the numbers of people attempting the crossing, but it did have a huge impact of cruelty and harm to the refugees who were subject to offshoring. We already have difficulty in this country in ensuring that asylum seekers have adequate access to legal representation, to adequate hygiene and to the other most basic needs. To take that process offshore to somewhere out of sight and away from our ability to scrutinise it would make it much more difficult to ensure that those minimum standards were met.

What I hope would never happen is what happened in the Australian case, where teams of experts from the UN and Médecins sans Frontières, and teams of paediatricians, reported finding the most traumatised population that they had ever seen or worked with, including among victims of torture. There were extremely elevated rates of self-harm and suicide, even among children. It ended in abject failure. Not only had it not deterred people from taking boats to Australia; it ended up with the Australian Government forced to medically evacuate all remaining residents of those camps in 2019, having spent €6 billion on the entire process. That is an absolutely disastrous model for the UK that we absolutely should not pursue.

Aside from the moral objections that may not be shared by all but that the JCWI certainly feels about the UK––one of the richest countries in the world––attempting to palm off our responsibility to refugees on to a developing country such as Rwanda, the impact was cruelty, and cruelty with no point, no purpose and no achievement. The situation just continued––

[The Chair]

Ms Gardner, you have put your case extremely well and I do not want to inhibit what you want to say, but I do want to see whether more Members can ask questions.

[Jonathan Gullis]

Q I have one short question. If these people in Calais are legitimate refugees, why are they not claiming asylum in France, Italy, Spain or Greece? Why do they need to come to the United Kingdom?

Lucy Moreton: Many of them have.

Zoe Gardner: As I am sure you are aware because I think the previous witness did say this, the vast majority of people who seek asylum worldwide––86% of refugees and displaced people worldwide––remain in the country neighbouring the one they have fled. So 86% of people remain in developing countries.

France received three times as many asylum applications as we did last year. Most people stop as soon as they feel safe. The people making their way to England and who specifically wish to come to the UK do so because they have ties to this country, either because they have served with our military, as in the case of people from Afghanistan, or they have family members, as with the Syrian client I mentioned whom the JCWI is representing. They may also speak the language because of our colonial history and have other ties of kinship and history here.

There are people who have legitimate ties to the UK and there is no good reason why they should have their claims assessed in France if they do not wish to. It does not really work for us to say to the French, “Given that we are geographically located slightly to the west of you, none of these refugees is our responsibility. They are all on you,” because France could say the same thing. Then Italy could say the same thing and the entire international refugee protection system will crumble. It is necessary––

[The Chair]

Ms Gardner, you are making your case really well but I am trying to get a couple more people in before we go to the Minister, if that is okay, so I apologise. Paul Blomfield.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chair]

We only have a few minutes, so I call Jonathan Gullis.

[Jonathan Gullis]

Q Thank you, Ms McDonagh. We are really grateful to hear that more needs to be happening with the French, and recent events seem to be improving matters. Mr Smith, why do you believe that people are choosing to come to the United Kingdom rather than claiming asylum in France, Greece and other parts of the European Union?

Tony Smith: That is a great question. It is called the pull factor. A number of books have been written by people probably better qualified than I am that talk about what that pull factor is. I think there are number of reasons why people would quite like to live in the UK rather than in mainland Europe. Personally, I think the main one is communities. We have a significantly diverse range of communities across the UK where people can feel comfortable in terms of getting the support they need. We are generous—I would not say very generous—in our treatment of asylum seekers. We have hosted conferences in places like Hungary and Croatia—countries where, if you were to ask asylum seekers, they would probably say that you do not get a very good deal from the Government who are supposed to be protecting your welfare, whereas you will get that in the UK; you will also get good legal representation and a very full hearing. These are all things that we should be very proud of, but I think inevitably it does mean that more people want to come to the UK.

The other element is language. English is the second language for many, many people from different parts of the world, which means that this is still—you might not believe it—a very desirable place to come and live. People are prepared to pay a good deal of money to get here on the basis that not only would they have a better life if they came here, but their broader family would have a better life. It is a genuine aspiration for a lot of people.

That is the nature of immigration and border controls. There will be a dividing line. You are going to create legislation and a set of rules. You are going to get people in front of you who do not want any border at all and who think we should let everybody in. You are going to get other people here who want to build a fortress around Britain. That has always been the case, but in 40 years at the Home Office—I was one of those civil servants who stayed in the Department; I did not bounce around Whitehall like they do nowadays—I never once worked for any Government who said that they were prepared to approach a fully open border and free movement across our borders. In fact, the vast majority have sought to tighten up our immigration and borders system, or at least to make it firmer but fairer.

We cannot lose sight of the firmness bit. There will be a need to arrest people, and there will be a need to deport people. That does not sit well, does it? It does not feel nice, but if you are going to have an effective border control, you have to be able to enforce your laws. At the moment, there is a feeling that with this particular cohort, we are not really doing any enforcement at all.

[Jonathan Gullis]

Q I can certainly assure you that in Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke we are keen to see more enforcement, because people are getting sick to death of the boats that are constantly landing on the English shore. My final question is this. We know that out of the illegal economic migrants crossing the English channel, 70% of those who are landing are males aged between 18 and 35. Why is this particular group so attracted? Why are they travelling alone in this instance?

[The Chair]

Mr Smith, if you could hold your answer to that question, I am going to try to bring in Paul Howell as well.